I have recently been hired as the IT admin for a new design firm that is starting up which will be using almost 100% Mac OS X hardware (no / limited Windows devices). Our users are NOT technically savvy at all and we need a simple solution for managing the backups of their devices. Can anyone here provide a recommendation for a solution? Is using something like Apple Time Machine a worthwhile endeavor? Just looking for some guidance as I’ve never been faced with this particular challenge before.

If you have users just working locally with no shared storage, Time Machine is probably going to be the Quick/Simple option.

If you have, or can have a centralized storage device, like a NAS or File Server, your options are greater. Most business NAS solutions have a backup option, you could simply put in another NAS and have them replicate. An alternative would be to put in a Server, Windows or Linux, and use available backup software for that.

Are you running any servers in this company which you can have users save their files to? That way, you have a centralized location to backup. Otherwise, you may want to look at CrashPlan which supports Mac (Free to backup to local devices or you can backup to their cloud offsite)

Standard practice is work locally for Adobe apps (they do *not* offically support opening from or saving directly to a network - Mac or Windows), and then copy completed work to a centralized server. Server gets backed up. For that, please see the other thread :-)

Thanks Kevin. Yes, we need to back up the workstations. Some of our designers' are working with files that are many GB in size (e.g., video), so opening these files over a network connection isn't ideal. They copy their files over the network to their local machine, and when they're done with their project, they copy them back. Should a workstation become faulty while they're working on a project, we want to avoid data loss.

Thanks Kevin. Yes, we need to back up the workstations. Some of our designers' are working with files that are many GB in size (e.g., video), so opening these files over a network connection isn't ideal. They copy their files over the network to their local machine, and when they're done with their project, they copy them back. Should a workstation become faulty while they're working on a project, we want to avoid data loss.

+﻿1 to Crashplan for that kind of scenario. Set up a local, on-premise destination as your CrashPlan server and point the clients at it for a destination.

Build yourself a freenas server and set it up to do time machine backups on your macs. From there back the freenas up to crash plan with the plugin and also set up bit torrent sync plugin on it as well so you can sync users projects to it you should be good to go from there.

If you have users just working locally with no shared storage, Time Machine is probably going to be the Quick/Simple option.

If you have, or can have a centralized storage device, like a NAS or File Server, your options are greater. Most business NAS solutions have a backup option, you could simply put in another NAS and have them replicate. An alternative would be to put in a Server, Windows or Linux, and use available backup software for that.

There's also bound to be other backup software available for Mac.

These are all great suggestions! As Paragraph mentioned, many backup solutions can protect Mac OS X. Are you only looking for a backup solution for the workstations, or will you need to protect other clients?

One of the biggest immediate benefits to using CrashPlan vs. Time Machine is saving space. Time Machine archives start out as the same size as your data, and get bigger fast because each additional version adds the full size of that file to the backup. With CrashPlan, de-duplication and compression makes the initial backup smaller than the size of the files you're backing up, and archive growth is slower because we're only sending the changed parts of the each file. You can read more on deduplication here.

Additionally, CrashPlan regularly runs a maintenance process on your backup archive to verify that the data you've backed up can be restored. This repair process is really useful in ensuring you have usable backups. See more on maintenance here.

Advantages to using Time Machine include a prettier interface for restoring, especially previous versions (though the actual functionality of restoring previous versions is in CrashPlan too), and the integration with the OS for things like total system restore or migration. Another advantage is with licensing. The free version of CrashPlan is limited to personal use only— since you're looking to use it to back up business computers you'd have to use CrashPlan PRO or PROe.

﻿Time Machine is worth backing up data on OS X. But it is advisable to look more backup options. Cloud is second best available resource to backup your important data. Though Disk Cloning and Imaging is still relevant and quickly creates an exact replica of the Macs. Stellar Drive Clone is a backup utility that is available in technical license allowing you to backup 10 Macs at a time. With clone software you can simultaneously backup multiple Macs and create bootable backups. Time Machine & Clouds are sophisticated but they lack in making your backup bootable.

If you have users just working locally with no shared storage, Time Machine is probably going to be the Quick/Simple option.

If you have, or can have a centralized storage device, like a NAS or File Server, your options are greater. Most business NAS solutions have a backup option, you could simply put in another NAS and have them replicate. An alternative would be to put in a Server, Windows or Linux, and use available backup software for that.

There's also bound to be other backup software available for Mac.

These are all great suggestions! As Paragraph mentioned, many backup solutions can protect Mac OS X. Are you only looking for a backup solution for the workstations, or will you need to protect other clients?

I have a Mac Pro as a server for my creative department and they save all their files on there and it gets backed up nightly differentials to a NAS and weekly/monthly full tape backups with Retrospect.

I have a hard drive in the Pro designated specifically for network Time Machine backups for users workstations. It has worked great for individual files but not so great for completely restoring their machines, maybe its something on my end but I haven't figured it out yet.

I am in the process of upgrading our setup and am probably going to switch to using Retrospect for the clients as well, my license came with 1 server and 20 clients so I'm able to do so and have it be more controlled and just backed up nightly so TM isn't taking up resources while my users are working.﻿

I would highly recommend trying out Retrospect. We have over 20 years of experience backing up Macintosh systems. When using Retrospect, you can perform backups of the local "backup server" plus any desktops or MacBooks you have on the network. You can save your data to locally attached disks, tape drives or NAS devices.